TurboTalk

Bridging the Virtualization Management Gaps

“It’s midnight: do you know where your applications are?”

It used to be somewhat easy. The world was static with relatively few moving parts. A single application on a single OS on a single server with attached storage. With a few (sometime more than a few) pointed niche management tools we were able to get our hands around and manage our environments. Well, virtualization changes everything.  No more static boundaries and well defined interactions between the IT silos.

Do you know where your applications are?  Do you know where your virtual machines are?  Do you know what resources they are using?  Do you know how they perform?  Do they need more or less resources to deliver on their goals?   Are there bottlenecks in your environment? Where are the bottlenecks?

More important! Do you know what you need to DO now? In the next minute? Hour? Day? Week? Month? Do you need to start a new VM? Stop a VM? Move a VM? Do you know where to start/move the VM? Do you need to reconfigure any of its resources?  Do you need to provide more resources? What do you need to do to address the bottlenecks? How do you prevent them?

Are the management tools up to the tasks at hand? The answer is NO!

Virtualization brings down the walls between the silos, but management is lagging far behind and continuing on the trajectory to nowhere of the last decades. There are five fundamental gaps in today’s management environment that we need to bridge before we can address the challenges and opportunities introduced by virtualization:

• Business Gap – IT management is not aligned with the supported business and is not governed by business driven goals and polices.
• Management Information Gap – IT is focused on collecting too much data about the infrastructure that has to be deciphered, creating a huge gap between the raw data that is collected and the meaningful, actionable, information required for intelligent cost effective operation.
• Technology Gap – Heterogeneous environments made up of a wide variety of technologies spanning from networks, through server, storage, and all the way up to the applications. All are parts of the IT stack participating in delivering business service, yet they are being managed in silos. Furthermore, within each layer of the stack, each technology and each product is managed separately.
• Operational Gap – Operational disciplines, fault, performance, planning, configuration, provisioning, accounting/billing, security are all done separately.
• Automation Gap – To reduce complexity and operational costs, we strive for self- managed environments, i.e., environments that configure themselves, optimize themselves, secure themselves and practically heal themselves. Yet, these self-managed automation functions are tightly interacting with the managed entities, dealing with the detailed mess of the different entities in the environment. There is no decomposition of services and no decoupling of functional layers. We end up with one big monolithic mess of interactions.

A proper foundation for bridging the gaps must have three tenets, Abstraction, Analysis, and Automation:

• Abstraction – a layer of abstraction provides a model of the managed environments. The models hide the details of the environments by providing a common abstraction of the heterogeneous environments, exposing a common, rich, semantic interface for interacting with the environments.
• Analysis – analysis engines driven by the knowledge captured and represented by the abstraction layer to drive intelligent decision automation.
• Automation – expose the foundations as collections of services orchestrated using workflow engines driven by business policies.

Utilizing these three tenets provides the proper foundation for virtualization management solutions that will:

• Provide intelligent actionable information with minimal monitoring information, reversing the current trend of chasing too much information and trying to discover, represent and rely on continuously changing topological relationships.
• Scale to the increasing sizes of future environments, meeting the challenges of dynamically changing heterogeneous environment utilizing common abstractions.
• And above all, tie the viewing with the doing utilizing intelligent analysis to drive automation and reduce operational costs!

Category: Management

Posted on December 7, 2009 | Permalink | View Comments